Posts tagged David Beito

These are consolidated from a pair of comments that I made in a thread back around last November on Thaddeus Russell’s Facebook wall. The thread was originally about some silly noise that comes up about once every four years, but it branched out into some interesting discussions about the left, individualist and libertarian perspectives, and so on. My interlocutor’s questions unfortunately seem to have disappeared from the thread, and I hate leaving writing locked up in a web silo, especially in the middle of a big, gradually composting discussion thread, so I’ve tried to condense it into a post here.

I’ve often been asked — by friendly-but-skeptical leftists, and even sometimes by fellow anti-capitalist anarchists — why market libertarians — who may be opposed to the government war machine, police, prisons, and all the other obviously destructive and repressive and regressive things done by the state, for fairly obvious reasons — are also so opposed to, and so hard on, social programs, like TANF, food stamps, WIC, Medicaid, Social Security, etcetera. (The question is usually posed in terms of contrasting government programs that hurt and kill people with government programs that, at least in principle, are supposed to be helping people.) And there are different ways to think about this. To a great extent, left-wing market anarchists don’t spend a lot of time focusing on social programs, and generally insist on prioritizing the core state violence and primary interventions of war, police, prisons, prohibitions, borders, and bail-outs as categorically more important than, say, opposing Medicaid or complaining about government spending on food stamps. And as a matter of strategic priorities, I agree — opposing the crowbars will always be more important to my idea of liberation than imposing the crutches. But I don’t think that means that there is nothing to say about problems that are inherent to the welfare state and government social programs, or that they ought to be considered as neutral or benign. Left-wing market anarchists have important reasons to oppose them — reasons to oppose governmental social programs, not from the economic Right, but from the radical Left.

. . . The key to an understanding of relief-giving is in the functions it serves for the larger economic and political order, for relief is a secondary and supportive institution. Historical evidence suggests that relief arrangements are initiated or expanded during the occasional outbreaks of civil disorder produced by mass unemployment, and are then abolished or contracted when political stability is restored. We shall argue that expansive relief policies are designed to mute civil disorder, and restrictive ones to reinforce work norms. In other words, relief policies are cyclical—liberal or restrictive depending on the problems of regulation in the larger society with which government must contend. Since this view clearly belies the popular supposition that government social policies, including relief policies, are becoming progressively more responsible, humane, and generous, a few words about this popular supposition and its applicability to relief are in order.

There is no gainsaying that the role of government has expanded in those domestic matters called social welfare. One has only to look at the steadily increasing expenditures by local, state, and national governments for programs in housing, health care, education, and the like. . . . But most such social welfare activity has not greatly aided the poor, precisely because the poor ordinarily have little influence on government. Indeed, social welfare programs designed for other groups frequently ride roughshod over the poor, as when New Deal agricultural subsidies resulted in the displacement of great numbers of tenant farmers and sharecroppers, or when urban renewal schemes deprived blacks of their urban neighborhoods. . . . As for relief programs themselves, the historical pattern is clearly not one of progressive liberalization; it is rather a record of periodically expanding and contracting relief rolls as the system performs its two main functions: maintaining civil order and enforcing work. . . . But much more should be understood of this mechanism than merely that it reinforces work norms. It also goes far toward defining and enforcing the terms on which different classes of people are made to do different kinds of work; relief arrangements, in other words, have a great deal to do with maintaining social and economic inequities. The indignities and cruelties of the dole are no deterrent to indolence among the rich; but for the poor person, the specter of ending up on the welfare or in the poorhouse makes any job at any wage a preferable alternative. And so the issue is not the relative merit of work itself; it is rather how some people are made to do the harshest work for the least reward.

The left-wing market anarchist addition to this leftist analysis is, first, to point out the extent to which the forms of structural poverty, deprivation, marginalization, concentrations of wealth and ultimately the desperation and civil unrest that social programs are designed to mute, are not simple or inevitable offshoots of market profit-taking, but rather themselves manufactured by the political entrenchment of capitalism and constantly reinforced and sustained through precisely the core state violence and primary interventions — the war, police, prisons, prohibitions, borders, bail-outs, military-industrial complex, monopolies, and other regressive and repressive functions of government — that we prioritize. (On which, see Markets Not Capitalism, etc.) And, second, to insist on the essential importance of positive grassroots, community-based alternatives rather than trying to save or liberalize institutionalized government programs.

Social programs administered by government are a weak and alienating substitute for the grassroots, working-class institutions of mutual aid, labor solidarity and fighting unions that they were largely designed to crowd out, replace, or domesticate. Grassroots social movements aimed to provide relief and person-to-person solidarity by creating alternative institutions that would be in the hands of workers themselves, so that they could better take control of the conditions of their own lives and labor. Government social programs have systematically aimed to monopolize the relief while abandoning any effort at worker control, instead transferring power into the hands of a politically appointed bureaucracy, and largely leaving working folks’ interests at the mercy of party politics. See, for examples, David Beito’s From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State and Paul Buhle’s Taking Care of Business, or, more recently, scott crow’s Black Flags and Windmills or Occupy Sandy, etc.

So (as a left-wing market anarchist) I am all for social programs and a social safety net — but I should like them to be really genuinely social, rather than governmental. So in my view, a libertarian view on markets needn’t, and shouldn’t, have anything to do with economic Rightism or corporate power; it can just as easily mean advocating militant industrial unions, strikes, sit-ins, Food Not Bombs, neighborhood mutual aid, lodge practice contracts, Panther breakfasts, women’s self-help clinics, Common Ground, Occupy Sandy, etc. as models of grassroots social change. And — holding that these are models that are preferable to the politically-controlled, professional-class-dominated and highly paternalistic bureaucracies — OSHA, TANF, WIC, EEOC, Medicare, PPACA, FEMA, etc. — that political progressives are too often inclined to treat as the non-negotiable defining commitments of the economic Left.

* * *

In the original conversation that inspired this note, a friendly-but-skeptical progressive said that she appreciated the focus on grassroots, community-based forms of mutual aid, labor solidarity, and participatory safety nets; but wanted to know whether government programs might have a role to play given that grassroots organizing is always going to demand a very high level of social participation, and sometimes people might be looking for institutions that can handle some problems without everyone in the community constantly having to be constantly involved in everything that anyone might need. It was a good question, and I definitely understand the desire to be able to take a step back in some cases. (It’s certainly something I’ve often felt, as I’m sure anyone who’s ever done a lot of participating in a community effort or an activist project eventually does feel.) But what I’d want to say is that the important thing about grassroots, non-governmental group is not so much the fact of constant participation (I sure hope I don’t have to do that!) as the constant possibility of participation. And the possibility of withdrawal is if anything just as important (so if the local Food Not Bombs or Common Ground clinic becomes completely dysfunctional you can always leave and start devoting your efforts to something else more worthwhile. But if a county social-services office becomes completely dysfunctional, they typically stay paid regardless, since you don’t have any way to redirect how your personal tax dollars are allocated. That’s controlled by a political process and a fairly elaborate set of rules for evaluating civil-service performance, which are an awful lot of degrees removed from the people most aware of and directly affected by the dysfunction.)

In any case, as far as participation goes, sometimes you want to take a step back and let others do a lot of the work, and of course that can happen. (The lodges had officers and divided up organizational work among the members, Panther breakfasts and FNBs and free clinics served a lot of people in the community, some of whom volunteered to help out, lots of whom didn’t, and lots of whom would spend some time on and some time off.) But all of this is an important difference from the politically controlled programs, where there’s no opportunity to step up and take a participatory role, even if you want to; where if they are seriously underserving or misserving or treating their clients in manipulative or exploitative ways, there isn’t any real remedy because they hold all the power in the relationship and the only voice you have in the proceedings, if any at all, are the incredibly attenuated processes of trying to vote in different political parties, etc.

I don’t know how much that answered the question, in the end; but I hope it at least points in a fruitful direction for thinking about what an answer would look like.

The Paradox of Property. Roderick, Austro-Athenian Empire (2011-05-05). Nonlibertarians are often puzzled as to why libertarians accept such strong property rights claims (sometimes called “absolute” property rights, though I’ve never figured out what “absolute” is supposed to mean in this context). The answer I’m going to give here is one I’ve already offered elsewhere (see here and here),...(Linked Thursday 2011-05-05.)

C4SS Appeal. Roderick, Austro-Athenian Empire (2010-08-28). Guest Blogs by Brad Spangler and Kevin Carson PLAN B: Okay, It’s Time to Panic by Brad Spangler Dear Supporters of the Center for a Stateless Society, I blame myself. When we launched the month-plus long fundraising drive for combined July and August expenses two weeks ago, I tried to...(Linked Saturday 2010-08-28.)

Gandhi on the State. Sheldon Richman, Free Association (2010-08-27). "The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence." --Gandhi(HT: Shikha Dalmia)Atom(Linked Sunday 2010-08-29.)

Unpaving is Progressive. Kevin Carson, Center for a Stateless Society (2010-08-17). Rachel Maddow and Paul Krugman, among others, have been in a tizzy recently about the unpaving of roads. One result of Congress’s refusal to renew counter-cyclical stimulus grants to state and local government is that fiscally strapped governments are cutting back on highway maintenance. Specifically, dozens of counties in several...(Linked Sunday 2010-08-29.)

Liberty, Equality, Solidarity: Toward a Dialectical Anarchism

Charles Johnson (2006/2008)

Reprinted with permission of the Publishers from Liberty, Equality, Solidarity: Toward a Dialectical Anarchism in Anarchism/Minarchism, ed. Roderick T. Long and Tibor R. Machan (Ashgate, 2008). pp. 155-188. If you reprint this article, please retain this attribution.

The purpose of this essay is political revolution. And I don’t mean a
“revolution” in libertarian political theory, or a revolutionary new political
strategy, or the kind of “revolution” that consists in electing a cadre of new
and better politicians to the existing seats of power. When I say a
“revolution,” I mean the real thing: I hope that this essay will contribute to
the overthrow of the United States government, and indeed all governments
everywhere in the world. You might think that the argument of an academic essay
is a pretty slender reed to lean on; but then, every revolution has to start
somewhere, and in any case what I have in mind may be somewhat
different from what you imagine. For now, it will be enough to say that I intend
to give you some reasons to become an individualist anarchist,[1] and undermine some of the
arguments for preferring minimalist government to anarchy. In the process, I
will argue that the form of anarchism I defend is best understood from what
Chris Sciabarra has described as a dialectical orientation in social
theory,[2] as part of a larger effort to
understand and to challenge interlocking, mutually reinforcing systems of
oppression, of which statism is an integral part—but only one part among others.
Not only is libertarianism part of a radical politics of human liberation, it is
in fact the natural companion of revolutionary Leftism and radical feminism.

My argument will take a whole theory of justice—libertarian rights
theory[3]—more or less for granted: that is, some
version of the “non-aggression principle” and the conception of “negative”
rights that it entails. Also that a particular method for moral inquiry—ethical
individualism—is the correct method, and that common claims of collective
obligations or collective entitlements are therefore unfounded. Although I will
discuss some of the intuitive grounds for these views, I don’t intend to give a
comprehensive justification for them, and those who object to the views may just
as easily object to the grounds I offer for them. If you have a fundamentally
different conception of rights, or of ethical relations, this essay will
probably not convince you to become an anarchist. On the other hand, it may help
explain how principled commitment to a libertarian theory of rights—including a
robust defense of private property rights—is compatible with struggles
for equality, mutual aid, and social justice. It may also help show that
libertarian individualism does not depend on an atomized picture of human social
life, does not require indifference to oppression or exploitation other than
government coercion, and invites neither nostalgia for big business nor
conservatism towards social change. Thus, while my argument may not
directly convince those who are not already libertarians of some sort,
it may help to remove some of the obstacles that stop well-meaning Leftists from
accepting libertarian principles. In any case, it should show non-libertarians
that they need another line of argument: libertarianism has no necessary
connection with the “vulgar political economy” or “bourgeois liberalism” that
their criticism targets.

The threefold structure of my argument draws from the three demands made by
the original revolutionary Left in France: Liberty, Equality,
and Solidarity.[4] I will argue that, rightly
understood, these demands are more intertwined than many contemporary
libertarians realize: each contributes an essential element to a radical
challenge to any form of coercive authority. Taken together, they undermine the
legitimacy of any form of government authority, including the
“limited government” imagined by minarchists. Minarchism eventually requires
abandoning your commitment to liberty; but the dilemma is obscured when
minarchists fracture the revolutionary triad, and seek “liberty” abstracted from
equality and solidarity, the intertwined values that give the demand for freedom
its life, its meaning, and its radicalism. Liberty, understood in light of
equality and solidarity, is a revolutionary doctrine demanding anarchy,
with no room for authoritarian mysticism and no excuse for arbitrary dominion,
no matter how “limited” or benign.

Liberty

Individual liberty is essential to political justice
for both minarchist and anarchist libertarians. Both understand political
liberty as freedom from organized coercion: force, under libertarian theory, can
only be legitimate in defense of an individual person’s
liberty, never when initiated against those who have not trespassed
against any identifiable victim. Libertarians often draw boundaries between
liberty and invasion through the principle of self-ownership: you are
rightly your own master, and nobody else, individually or collectively, is
entitled to claim you as their property.[5] That
includes governments: self-ownership is held to be unconditional and
“prepolitical,” in that it does not depend on the guarantees of political
constitutions or legislation, but rather logically precedes them and
constrains the constitutions and legislation that can legitimately be
established. Thus anarchists and minarchists agree that political power should
be subordinated to the principle of self-ownership, and everyone left alone to
do as she pleases with her own person and property provided she respects the
same freedom for others. But they disagree over what these principles entail.
Minarchists argue that the rights of liberty and self-defense, delegated and
institutionalized, establish the legitimacy of a “night-watchman”
State,[6] limited by a written constitution
and devoted to the rule of law. For anarchists, the rights of liberty and
self-defense expose even the “night-watchman” State as professionalized
usurpation, and reveal all government laws and written constitutions as mere
paper without authority. Such a conflict demands explanation, and clarification
of the terms of the dispute.

I won’t hazard a definition of either “government” or “state” here,
but some essential features can be described. States have governments, and
governments, as such, claim authority over a defined range of territory
and citizens. Governments claim the right to issue legitimate orders to
anyone subject to them, and to use force to compel obedience.[7] But
governments claim more than that: after all, I have the right to order
you out of my house, and to shove you out if you won’t go quietly. Governments
claim supreme authority over legally enforceable claims within
their territory; while I have a right to order you off my property, a government
claims the right to make and enforce decisive, final, and exclusive orders on
questions of legal right[8]—for example, whether it
is my property, if there is a dispute, or whether you have a right to
stay there. That means the right to review, and possibly to overturn or punish,
my demands on you—to decisively settle the dispute, to enforce the
settlement over anyone’s objections, and deny to anyone outside the
government the right to supersede their final say on it. Some
governments—the totalitarian ones—assert supreme authority over every
aspect of life within their borders; but a “limited government” asserts
authority only over a defined range of issues, often enumerated in a
written constitution. Minarchists argue not only that governments should be
limited in their authority, but specifically that the supreme authority of
governments should be limited to the adjudication of disputes over individual
rights, and the organized enforcement of those rights. But even the most minimal
minarchy, at some point, must claim its citizens’ exclusive
allegiance—they must love, honor and obey, forsaking all others, or else
they deny the government the prerogative of sovereignty. And a
“government” without sovereign legal authority is no government at all.

Authority, in the political sense, is correlative with
deference. Insofar as Twain is subject to Norton’s authority, Twain is
obliged to defer to Norton’s decisions, and Norton can compel him to obey. But
the sort of deference must be carefully distinguished. Robert Paul Wolff notes that

An authoritative command must … be
distinguished from a persuasive argument. When I am commanded to do
something, I may choose to comply even though I am not being
threatened, because I am brought to believe that it is something
which I ought to do. If that is the case, then I am not, strictly
speaking, obeying a command, but rather acknowledging the force or
rightness of a prescription. … But the person himself [sic]
has no authority—or, to be more precise, my complying with his
command does not constitute an acknowledgment on my part of any such
authority. (1970, 6)

Reason is no respecter of persons, but authority is personal: if
Norton has legitimate authority over Twain, then Twain’s obligation to
defer doesn’t come from the nature of what Norton decided, but from the
fact that Norton decided it.[9] Wolff’s point could be
sharpened by further distinguishing epistemic authority from
imperative authority. There are cases where you should defer to an
authority because she possesses some special expertise on the issue at
hand.[10] But this is more scientific authority than
political authority, and not really what Wolff seems to have in mind. The reason
that lawyers bring their cases before the Supreme Court is not just that the
Nine have some special expertise on the requirements of the law. Maybe they do,
but the reason that others are supposed to defer to their judgment has
to do with the offices they personally hold; their status is
constitutive of the binding force of the judgment. However
expert a mere lawyer may be, her opinion still amounts only to a
brief, not a ruling, unless and until the judge personally
authorizes it. It’s not that the issue lies within the court’s
expertise, but that it (supposedly) lies within their
prerogative.

It is not enough, then, for a minarchist just to postulate an ideal
government that makes some rulings worth enforcing on their own merits.
If a judgment is worth enforcing on its own merits, then it surely is
perfectly legitimate to enforce it, but then the legitimacy comes from the
content of the judgment, not from its source.[11]
That justifies enforcing the judge’s ruling, but it does not establish
that the judge’s authorization confers any special legitimacy on the
enforcement, above or beyond what private citizens could confer, either
individually or cooperatively in private “defense associations,” given enough
wisdom, study, and application. Minarchists need a theory that legitimates
exclusive government authority through the special positions that
government agents occupy, and the sovereign status of the government
they represent. Without one, they have no justification for the special
prerogatives claimed by even the most scrupulously limited of governments.

I claim that minarchists cannot consistently offer the kind of
theory that they need to offer, because no possible theory can connect
sovereign authority to legitimacy, without breaking the
connection between legal right and individual liberty. My case
for this claim consists of three challenges, each developed in the anarchist
literature, which demonstrate a conflict between individual liberty and one of
the forms of special authority that minarchists have traditionally wanted
governments to exercise.[12] Since the clearest expression of the first,
and most basic, challenge is in Roy Childs’s “Open Letter to Ayn Rand,” we might
call it the Childs challenge. Rand argues that a government must be strictly
limited to the defensive use of force in order to be morally distinguishable
from a robber gang.[13] She holds that even the legitimate
functions of a properly limited government must be funded voluntarily
by the governed, condemning taxation in any form.[14] However, she insists
on the legitimacy of sovereignty and explicitly rejects individualist
anarchism.[15] Childs, accepting Rand’s description of a
government as “an institution that holds the exclusive power to
enforce certain rules of social conduct in a given geographical
area,”[16] argues that no institution can claim that
authority and remain limited to the defensive use of force at the same time:

Suppose that I were distraught with the service of a
government in an Objectivist society. Suppose that I judged, being as rational
as I possibly could, that I could secure the protection of my contracts and the
retrieval of stolen goods at a cheaper price and with more efficiency. Suppose I
either decide to set up an institution to attain these ends, or patronize one
which a friend or a business colleague has established. Now, if he [sic] succeeds in setting up the agency, which provides all
the services of the Objectivist government, and restricts his more
efficient activities to the use of retaliation against aggressors, there are
only two alternatives as far as the “government” is concerned: (a) It can use
force or the threat of it against the new institution, in order to keep its
monopoly status in the given territory, thus initiating the use or threat of
physical force against one who has not himself initiated force. Obviously,
then, if it should choose this alternative, it would have initiated force.
Q.E.D. Or: (b) It can refrain from initiating force, and allow the new
institution to carry on its activities without interference. If it did this,
then the Objectivist “government” would become a truly marketplace institution,
and not a “government” at all. There would be competing agencies of protection,
defense and retaliation—in short, free market anarchism. (Childs 1969, ¶ 8)

Rand’s theory of limited government posits an institution with sovereign
authority over the use of force, but her theory of individual rights only allows
for the use of force in defense against invasions of rights. As long as
private defense agencies limit themselves to the defense of their clients’
rights, Rand cannot justify using force to suppress them. But if citizens are
free to cut their ties to the “government” and turn to private agencies for the
protection of their rights, then the so-called “government” no longer holds
sovereign authority to enforce its citizens’ rights; it becomes only one defense
agency among many.[17] Childs formulated his argument as an
internal critique of Ayn Rand’s political theory, but his dilemma challenges
any theory combining libertarian rights with government sovereignty.
Any “limited government” must either be ready to forcibly suppress private
defense agencies—in which case it ceases to be limited, by initiating
violence against peaceful people—or else it must be ready to coexist with
them—abdicating its claim to sovereignty and ceasing to be a government.
Since maintaining sovereignty requires an act of aggression, any
government, in order to remain a government, must be ready to trample the
liberty of its citizens, in order to establish and enforce a coercive monopoly
over the protection of rights.[18]

At this point, some minarchists—most famously Robert
Nozick—accept that a properly limited government cannot simply
suppress competition from rights-respecting defense agencies (without
ceasing to be properly limited), but reply that it can rightfully
constrain competing defense agencies to obey certain norms, and in
particular to respect certain procedural immunities for the accused. A lynch mob
has no right to demand that they be allowed to “compete” with courts; a properly
limited government has the right to prohibit procedures that impose unacceptable
risks of punishment on the innocent.[19] If it can prohibit
unreliable procedures, then it can force defense associations either to adopt
permitted procedures or disband. But then government sovereignty reasserts
itself, as the government becomes “the only generally effective enforcer of a
prohibition on others’ using unreliable enforcement procedures … and …
oversees these procedures” (Nozick 1974, 113–114). If a properly limited
government reserves the right to authorize enforcement by approved defense
agencies, and prohibit enforcement by rogue defense agencies, then it remains
the sovereign authorizer of enforcement, even if it becomes one of many
direct providers.

Governments probably are entitled to forbid enforcement procedures that
violate the procedural immunities due to the accused. But unless the minarchist
introduces some further reason to reserve this prerogative for the
government, the Childs challenge applies as much to the protection of procedural
immunities as to the ordinary protection of rights. If the government has a
right to suppress rogue agencies, then so does anyone, as a matter of
individual self-defense.[20] The universality of the right
draws out a second point. Nozick makes the transition from dominant protective
agency to minimal State by using language that suggests deputizing
private citizens: the government makes a list of who can be trusted to enforce
the law, and if you’re not on the list, then the government will stop you from
taking the law into your own hands. What matters is whether or not the
government has given you permission to act as a law-enforcer. The
picture depends on a blurring of the distinction amongst argument, authoritative
testimony, and prerogative. Defense associations may have the right to stop
other enforcers from using unreliable procedures, but whether a procedure is
unacceptably risky or not is a matter of fact, which can be characterized and
discovered independently of the say-so of the government. The
government’s seal of approval plays no constitutive role in the right
of an agency to use procedures that are demonstrably legitimate, and the
government’s own procedures must be subject to objective criticism as
much as any private enforcer’s. A right to suppress unacceptably risky efforts
at enforcement establishes no right to demand direct oversight of agencies’
procedures,[21] or to suppress “unauthorized” enforcers
simply for not having the official approval of the government.

The language of “permission,” “prohibition,” and “oversight” obscures the
distinction; but in fact the protection of procedural immunities is not properly
understood in terms of giving permission at all, but rather
respecting a general right.[22] The more generally
and impersonally a defense agency specifies its procedural protections, the less
they will resemble anything that could intelligibly be described as “oversight,”
“giving permission,” or , broadly, the exercise of political authority. The more
they resemble interventionist “oversight,” “giving permission,” or political
authority, the more they will tread on the freedom of innocent people to enforce
their own rights using reliable but unofficial procedures. The government in
Nozick’s “minimal State” must either adopt general policies allowing for free
competition without requiring grants of official permission—and once again
ceases to exercise sovereignty—or else it must enforce its demands of oversight
and official approval, even on agencies that are following reliable
procedures—and once again ceases to be limited to defensive uses of force.

There is another possible reply I find more promising—indeed, convincing.
Strictly speaking, Childs’s dilemma applies to only one branch of the
government: he demonstrates that governments cannot claim a monopoly on
enforcing the rights of citizens, i.e., on the executive
functions of government. It establishes that anyone, not just the government and
its official deputies, can enforce citizens’ rightful claims to person and
property. But how is it determined which claims are rightful, and
which claims are baseless? Robert Bidinotto has objected that anarchism
demands not only “’competition’ in the protection of rights,” but also
“’competition’ in defining what ‘rights’ are” (1994, ¶ 20); without a government
established as the “final arbiter on the use of force in society” (1994, ¶ 25),
there is no way to fix objective rules for the assertion of rights, and no
possibility of meaningful settlement of disputes over rights-claims. So even if
a minimal government cannot claim a monopoly on the executive functions, perhaps
a “microscopic” government could claim a monopoly on
legislation.[23]

Provided that the government legislature and government courts do not try to
interfere with protection of rights by private citizens or defense associations,
I cannot see how the Childs challenge could undermine sovereignty over
legislation. But a second challenge, vigorously expressed in the later works of
Lysander Spooner, can. In the “Letter to Grover Cleveland,” Spooner argues that
all legislation is either criminal, tyrannical, or idle:[24]

Let me then remind you that justice is an immutable, natural
principle; and not anything that can be made, unmade, or altered by
any human power. … Lawmakers, as they call themselves, can add
nothing to it, nor take anything from it. Therefore all their laws,
as they call them, – that is, all the laws of their own making, –
have no color of authority or obligation. It is a falsehood to call
them laws; for there is nothing in them that either creates men’s
[sic] duties or rights, or enlightens them as to their duties
or rights. … If they command men to do justice, they add nothing to
men’s obligation to do it, or to any man’s right to enforce it. They
are therefore mere idle wind, such as would be commands to consider
the day as day, and the night as night. If they command or license
any man to do injustice, they are criminal on their face. If they
command any man to do anything which justice does not require him to
do, they are simple, naked usurpations and tyrannies. If they forbid
any man to do anything, which justice could permit him to do, they
are criminal invasions of his natural and rightful liberty. In
whatever light, therefore, they are viewed, they are utterly
destitute of everything like authority or obligation. (1886, ¶¶
4–7)

Minarchists usually agree that governments have no legitimate authority to
command violations of individual rights, or to forbid acts permitted by
individual liberty—the motive for limiting government was the idea that
legitimate political authority only exists within the boundaries drawn by
individual rights. But Spooner’s point about laws that command justice or forbid
injustice—prohibiting murder, theft, rape, etc.—may be harder to grasp. It is,
after all, true that governments and defense associations are perfectly
justified in enforcing those laws. But what must be appreciated here is that the
obligation to follow those laws, and the right to enforce them, derives entirely
from the content of the laws and not their source. The
government is justified in enforcing those laws only because anybody
would be justified in enforcing justice, whether or not self-styled
legislators have signed off on a document stating “Murder is a crime most foul.”
The document itself is idle; it neither obliges nor authorizes anyone to do
anything they were not already obliged or free to do. The government is not so
much making new laws that impose obligations, but (at best!)
making declarations that recognize preexisting
obligations—which could be objectively specified by anyone, with or without
official approval from anyone.[25] Any right to override another’s assessment
would derive from objective and impersonal considerations of justice,
demonstrated through argument or attested on the basis of expertise,[26]not from political prerogatives invested in the so-called legislature.
Anyone, regardless of status, has the right to make correct declarations about
justice, and override or ignore incorrect declarations. With no special
prerogative to establish rights, and no special prerogative to enforce them (as
per the Childs challenge), the claim of “sovereignty” for a “properly limited
government” must involve either usurpation or idle pretense.

That said, I do think that there is one final straw for the
minarchist to grasp, even after the Childs challenge and the Spooner challenge
have been taken into account, relating to a lacuna in Spooner’s account of the
possible relationship between a piece of legislation and the background
principles of justice. Spooner discussed three possible cases: (1) the
legislation may demand something that contradicts what individual
rights require—making it criminal; (2) it may demand something that
exceeds what individual rights require—making it tyrannical; (3) it may
demand something identical to what individual rights require—making it
nugatory. Spooner’s argument presumes that the “prepolitical” framework of
individual rights determines every question of enforceable obligations,
leaving no room for legislators to exercise legitimate prerogative. But while
these options cover the bulk of both the criminal and the civil law, Spooner has
overlooked one important possibility: there may be cases where the principle of
self-ownership does not fully specify how to apply individual
rights in the case at hand.

It may be that respect for individual rights requires that cars going
opposite directions on a highway should drive on opposite sides—so that drivers
will not needlessly endanger each other’s lives. But self-ownership alone surely
has nothing to say about whether motorists should drive on the left or
the right. It requires that some rule be adopted, and that
once adopted, each motorist obey it. But which rule to adopt
is a question that needs to be settled by considerations other than individual
rights. Medieval legal writers described similar cases as reducing the
natural law (in the sense of making it more specific); the idea is to spell out
the details for cases where the principles of natural justice underdetermine the
correct application of individual rights. It may seem, then, that this ekes out
a place for positive law-making in spite of the Spooner challenge: since there
has to be some specification of how to apply rights in these cases, but
more than one specification is compatible with the requirements of individual
rights, a minarchist might think that you need a government to take on the
prerogative of specifying which one to adopt.[27]

If the Childs challenge undermined the executive authority of the
government, and the Spooner challenge undermined its legislative
authority, you might think of this move as preserving judicial
authority for a sovereign government. Sovereignty here means the right to serve
as the final authority on setting out auxiliary principles for applying
individual rights to specific cases where the requirements of self-ownership are
vague or contingent. To be sure, the limits put on the scope of its authority by
the Childs challenge and the Spooner challenge would be severe. The government
would have no executive and no general legislature; it would have no special
privileges to enforce and the scope of its law-making would be limited to
ironing out minor details within a system of obligations almost entirely
predetermined by the non-aggression principle. It would be a sort of
“ultramicroscopic government,” so small that its influence on the specification
and protection of rights could barely be detected at all.

Although I think that the problem of reducing the natural law is one of the
hardest problems for anarchist theory to resolve, I do not think that the
minarchist is actually in a stronger position than the anarchist. The difficulty
for the minarchist solution can be brought out with a final challenge, also from
the works of Lysander Spooner. This second Spooner challenge is expressed most
clearly in No Treason no. 1:

The question still remains, how comes such a thing as “a nation” to exist?
How do millions of men [sic], scattered over an
extensive territory – each gifted by nature with individual freedom; required by
the law of nature to call no man, or body of men, his masters; authorized by
that law to seek his own happiness in his own way, to do what he will with
himself and his property, so long as he does not trespass upon the equal liberty
of others; authorized also, by that law, to defend his own rights, and redress
his own wrongs; and to go to the assistance and defence of any of his fellow men
who may be suffering any kind of injustice – how do millions of such men
come to be a nation, in the first place? How is it that each of them
comes to be stripped of his natural, God-given rights, and to be incorporated,
compressed, compacted, and consolidated into a mass with other men, whom he
never saw; with whom he has no contract; and towards many of whom he has no
sentiments but fear, hatred, or contempt? How does he become subjected to the
control of men like himself, who, by nature, had no authority over him; but who
command him to do this, and forbid him to do that, as if they were his
sovereigns, and he their subject; and as if their wills and their interests were
the only standards of his duties and his rights; and who compel him to
submission under peril of confiscation, imprisonment, and death?

Clearly all this is the work of force, or fraud, or both.

…. We are, therefore, driven to the acknowledgment
that nations and governments, if they can rightfully exist at all, can exist
only by consent. (Section III, ¶¶ 1–6)

Spooner’s aim in No Treason is, famously, to demonstrate that
citizens are only obliged to recognize the sovereign authority when, and only
for as long as, they genuinely, individually consent to recognize its
authority. What I want to draw attention to are the reasons that
Spooner suggests for the requirement. Here, Spooner questions the notion of a
political jurisdiction, asking what by what right some gang
calling itself “the government,” however strictly limited, gains
authority over otherwise unrelated people who never had anything to do with
them? If there is some question of different ways in which rights could be
applied, then what sort of process and what sorts of relationship justify the
special claim that even an ultramicroscopic government would make to establish
their judgment in preference to all the others?

Spooner suggests that genuine, individual consent can explain their authority
over a jurisdiction. Suppose that Twain and Kearney have a dispute over how long
land must be left unused before it can be reclaimed as abandoned property. If
they both agree to turn the question over to Norton and defer to his judgment,
then it’s clear how Norton got jurisdiction over the case: Twain and Kearney
agreed to bind themselves to his judgment. But suppose that Twain and
Kearney never agreed to turn the question over to Norton, perhaps never even had
anything to do with Norton at all. If Norton should insist that they should
still defer to his judgment, because he is the Emperor, then
Norton has the burden of explaining what binds Twain and Kearney to him in such
a way that his judgment is more authoritative than anybody’s arbitrary fiat.
Even if the vague boundary between between Kearney’s and Twain’s claims needs to
be made more precise, where does Norton, specifically, get the right to enforce
his specification, except by consent of the disputing parties?

If consent is the standard, then the consent must be genuine. In
particular, it must be possible to refuse consent, or to
withdraw it later once given.[28] That means that
consent cannot justify any government body claiming permanent and
irrevocable sovereignty. If a court’s jurisdiction depends on the
consent of those who have put themselves under it, then each of those people
must be individually free to take herself out of the jurisdiction and create or
align herself with another jurisdiction. But without consent, it’s hard
to see what distinguishes the government’s assertion of special authority from
arbitrary fiat. If a community has settled on the rule of one year rather than
two for abandonment, the government has no authority to arbitrarily override the
settled conventions. If folks are divided over the right rule to follow, but
have agreed to submit the dispute to some third party whom they trust more than
the government, the government has no authority to butt in to enforce its own
decision over the agreed terms. If folks are divided over the right rule to
follow, and have not made any steps toward resolving the dispute, then the
government has no authority to arbitrarily force itself on them as the
arbiter.[29]

Liberty cannot coexist with government sovereignty, however “limited.” The
claim of sovereignty must be backed up by coercion at some point, given up or
reduced to a vacuous arrangement of words, whether sovereignty is claimed over
the enforcement of rights, the definition of rights, or the
application of rights. Any way you slice it, government sovereignty
means an invasion of individual freedom, and individual freedom means,
ultimately, freedom from the State.

Equality

The standard against which I have been measuring minarchist
governments in each of these three challenges is based on an intuitive notion of
Liberty that I have taken more or less for granted. That might expose me to
allegations that I’ve made my case by misapplying or inflating the concept of
“liberty” beyond the conceptual or material context that gives it meaning. In my
defense, I want to offer some remarks on the conceptual context within which I
think the principles of self-ownership and individual liberty arise, and to
consider two possible objections to the argument of the previous section. First,
it might be held that I have demonstrated a genuine conflict between individual
liberty and government authority, but that coercion is justified in the limited
case of establishing government sovereignty, either because some other important
value is at stake, or else because a little coercion is a necessary evil to
avoid much greater or much worse coercion. Or, it might be held that I have only
seemingly demonstrated a conflict between individual liberty and government
authority by applying the concepts of liberty and coercion outside of the
context within which they are meaningful: in this case, government authority
could not be properly characterized as either “coercive” or
“non-coercive,” perhaps because (for example) notions such as coercion and
freedom are only meaningful within a system of rights, and a system of rights is
only meaningful in the context of a functioning legal system. I think that
either charge reflects a failure to appreciate the conceptual relationship
between the revolutionary demands for Liberty and
Equality.

Attaching my controversial understanding of
liberty to the standard of equality might seem less than
prudent, if my interlocutor is a minarchist libertarian. Modern
libertarians make demands for individual liberty with
passion and urgency; their reaction to demands for social
equality is more often tepid if not openly hostile. Criticism of
social inequality is much more likely to be heard from the mouths of
unreconstructed statists, and “egalitarianism” is hardly a term
of praise in most libertarian intellectual circles. But I shall argue
that equality, rightly understood, is the best grounds
for principled libertarianism. When the conception of individual
liberty is uprooted from the demand for social equality, the
radicalism of libertarianism withers; it also leaves the libertarian
open to a family of conceptual confusions which prop up many of the
common minarchist arguments against anarchism.

My task, then, is to explain what I mean by “equality, rightly understood.” I
certainly do not intend to suggest that liberty is conceptually
dependent on economic equality (of either opportunity or
outcome), or on equality of socio-cultural status.[30]
But the equality I have in mind is also much more substantive
than the formal “equality before the law” or “equality of rights” suggested by
some libertarians and classical liberals, and rightly criticized by Leftists as
an awfully thin glove over a very heavy fist. Formal equality within a statist
political system, pervaded with pillage and petty tyranny, is hardly worth
fighting for; the point is to challenge the system, not to be equally
shoved around by it. The conception of equality that I have in mind has a
history on the Left older and no less revolutionary than the redistributionist
conception of socioeconomic equality. It is the equality that the French
revolutionaries had in mind when they demanded egalité, and which the American revolutionaries had in mind
when they stated:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men [sic] are created equal, that they are endowed by their
Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and
the pursuit of Happiness. (Jefferson 1776a ¶ 2)

Jefferson is making revolutionary use of concepts drawn from the English
liberal tradition. Equality, for Jefferson, is the basis for
independence, and the grounds from which individual rights
derive.[31] Locke elucidates the concept when he
characterizes a “state of Perfect freedom”—the state to which everyone is
naturally entitled—as

A State also of Equality, wherein all the Power and
Jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another: there
being nothing more evident, than that Creatures of the same species
and rank promiscuously born to all the same advantages of Nature, and
the use of the same faculties, should be equal one amongst another
without Subordination or Subjection …. (1690, II. 4. ¶ 2)

The Lockean conception of equality that underwrites Jefferson’s revolutionary
doctrine of individual liberty is, as Roderick Long (2001a) has argued, equality
of political authority. Jefferson and Locke denied, as arbitrary, the
Old Regime’s claim of a natural entitlement to lordship over their fellow
creatures. Ranks of superior and inferior political authority were not
established by natural differences in station or ordained by the will of God
Almighty. Political coercion is the material expression of a claim of unequal
authority: one person is entitled to dictate terms over another’s person and
property, and the other can be forced to obey. Declaring universal equality thus
means denying all such claims of lordship, and, thus, asserting that everyone
has authority over herself, and over herself alone. Equality
is the context within which the principle of self-ownership, and thus the demand
for individual freedom, takes root. This connection can be seen most explicitly
in the second Spooner challenge above. Spooner’s demand to know how free and
independent people are “compacted” together into a State against their will is
intimately connected with the protest against arbitrary assertions of a
right to dominate the affairs of others. Long points out that neither
socioeconomic equality nor formal legal equality “calls into question
the authority of those who administer the legal system; such administrators are
merely required to ensure equality, of the relevant sort, among those
administered. … Lockean equality involves not merely equality
before legislators, judges, and police, but, far more crucially,
equality with legislators, judges, and police” (¶¶ 22–25).
Whether or not Jefferson was right to treat the equality of authority as
self-evident, a minarchist should hardly want to deny that it is
true. The idea that legitimate governments must be constrained by the
non-aggression principle no less than private citizens, and the
individualist conception of rights, seem clearly rooted in the notion
of equal authority.[32]

But whenever a minarchist brandishes equality of authority against statism,
she also undermines her case for any form of State sovereignty.
Considering liberty in light of equality systematically undermines both of the
objections considered above, and justifies the unlimited demand for Liberty that
I have employed. Insofar as the first objection depends on consequentialist
calculation—holding that liberty can be sacrificed either in the name of other
goods, or in the name of maximizing the total amount of liberty going around—it
necessarily conflicts with a demand for equal authority. The objection
presupposes someone to do the consequentialist calculations, supposedly entitled
to treat all goods, no matter whom they belong to, as common booty to
be distributed. By claiming the right to volunteer not only her own
liberty, but also other people’s liberty for sacrificial duty, the
consequentialist exempts herself from the standard of equality,
pretending that she is entitled to stand over everyone and pass judgment on
their liberty, taking some from Peter and rendering some to Paul in the
name of the cause. Equality means that other people’s lives and livelihoods are
not hers to give, no matter the results she might get from it.[33]

The second sort of objection conflicts with equality in a different way. It
suggests, not that someone can legitimately violate one person’s
liberty in order to secure benefits for others, but that the force involved in
establishing sovereignty cannot be assessed under standards of liberty at all,
because the categorization of force as either aggressive or
defensive is only meaningful within the context of a functioning
government legal order. Thus, Bidinotto’s argument (1994) that the demand for
liberty, when applied unconditionally outside the background context of a
limited sovereign government, divorces rights-claims from the “final standard”
to settle them, and degrades into a programme for unrestrained tyranny and civil
war.

But it is Bidinotto, not the anarchist, who strips the concept of liberty out
of its proper context. The objection depends on a particular picture of the
State and its laws, which is as metaphysically illusive as it is captivating.
The State is imagined as a sort of titan standing over civil society,
binding it to its will and acting on it from without. The constraints that a
particular government imposes under the mantle of State authority may be
tyrannical or just, but whether used properly or abused, the peculiar standpoint
and the constraining force of the State seem necessary for any stable social
order, and sufficient to decisively settle disputes just by being asserted.
Since anarchy dispenses with the external constraints of the State, the
minarchist feels that all rights-claims will be left, as it were, hanging in the
air, with no final authority to ground them. It is this mystique of the State
that Randolph Bourne set out to expose by distinguishing amongst the Nation, the
State, and the Government:

The State is the country acting as a political unit, it is the group
acting as a repository of force, determiner of law, arbiter of
justice. … Government on the other hand is synonymous with neither
State nor Nation. It is the machinery by which the nation, organized
as a State, carries out its State functions. Government is a
framework of the administration of laws, and the carrying out of the
public force. Government is the idea of the State put into practical
operation in the hands of definite, concrete, fallible men. It is the
visible sign of the invisible grace. It is the word made flesh. And
it has necessarily the limitations inherent in all practicality.
Government is the only form in which we can envisage the State, but
it is by no means identical with it. That the State is a mystical
conception is something that must never be forgotten. Its glamor and
its significance linger behind the framework of Government and direct
its activities. (Bourne 1919, § 1 ¶¶ 8-9)

Equality of authority dulls the mystical glamor of
State authority. The law is a human institution, and the legitimate
authority of individual rights-claims does not need to be
grounded in the dominance of a sovereign, or proclaimed from a
standpoint beyond the fragile social relationships among
fallible, mortal human beings. A good thing, too, since there is no Olympian standpoint for the State to occupy; governments are
made of people with no more special authority than you or I—even
when they are speaking ex cathedra in the name of the State.
Rights are grounded in the claims that each of us, as ordinary human
beings, are entitled to hold each other to, and are implemented not
by paper laws but by the concrete social and cultural relationships
we participate in. Roderick Long (2008) shows that if the “final
standard” demanded by Bidinotto is the realistic finality
that comes from a broad consensus that an issue has been settled and
should not be revisited, then it can be achieved through anarchist
institutions no less than through a government; if the “finality”
demanded is some sort of self-applying, self-grounding finality
immune to even the possibility of further dispute, then that
is not available even under a government, the mystique of State
authority notwithstanding.[34]
The choice is not between a system where disputes are never
meaningfully settled and one where they are, but between one in which
they are settled through a decentralized network of institutions
holding each other in check, or through a centralized hierarchy
forcing others to defer to it. And, as Long argues, anarchy actually
provides a better hope for disputes to be settled justly
than minarchy—especially when an arbitrator is herself a party to
the dispute—because under anarchy the watchers are themselves
watched, and are less able to force through unjust rulings simply in
virtue of their dominant position.

The context of a concept is often
conceived as a constraint on the concept, and context-dropping as a
matter of applying the concept more widely than it should be
applied. But dropping the context of a concept could make you go
wrong in either of two ways: improper abstraction might
inflate the application of the concept beyond its domain of
significance; or it might conceal the concept’s significance
in cases where it should be applied. Understood in the
context of Equality, the principle of Liberty becomes more
radical, not less, challenging all forms of State mysticism with the
standard of individual sovereignty. Dispelling the mystical
conception of the State also reveals the need for concrete attitudes,
practices and relationships to sustain a free society, not just paper
laws to “limit” tyranny. Which brings me to Solidarity.

Solidarity

I have chosen the word “Solidarity” to stand for a family of
cultural and political commitments usually associated with the
radical Left, among them labor radicalism, populism,
internationalism, anti-racism, gay liberation, and radical feminism.
These commitments share a common concern with the class dynamics of
power and a sensitivity to expressions of non-governmental forms of
oppression. They demand fundamental change in the cultural and
material conditions faced by oppressed people, and propose that the
oppressed organize themselves into autonomous movements to struggle
for those changes. They also emphasize strikes, boycotts, mutual aid,
worker cooperatives, and other forms of collective action, both as a
means to social transformation and also as foundational institutions
of the transformed society once achieved. These shared concerns and
demands have often been summed up in the call for “social
justice”—a slogan assailed by Hayek (1978) and reflexively
associated, by libertarians and state Leftists alike, with expansion
of the anti-discrimination and welfare bureaucracies.

But solidaritarian ends can be separated from
authoritarian means, and the relationship between Liberty and
Solidarity has not always been so chilly. 19th century
libertarians, particularly the individualist anarchists associated
with Benjamin Tucker’s magazine Liberty, identified with the
cultural radicalism of their day – including the labor movement,
abolitionism, First Wave feminism, freethought, and “free love.”
Indeed, while Tucker described his position as “Absolute Free
Trade; … laissez faire the universal rule” (1888, ¶ 21),
he and his circle routinely identified themselves as socialists—not
to set themselves against the ideal of the free market, but
against actually existing big business. They argued that
plutocratic control over finance and capital was the creature of, and
the driving force behind, government economic regimentation and
government-granted monopolies.[35]
The Tuckerite individualists saw the invasive powers of the State as
intimately connected and mutually reinforcing with the exploitation
of labor, racism, patriarchy, and other forms of oppression, with
governments acting to enforce social privilege, and drawing
ideological and material support from existing power dynamics.[36]
From their point of view, attacking statism alone, without addressing
the broader social context, would be narrow and ultimately
self-frustrating.

Today the leading intellectual force in the
effort to connect libertarianism with a comprehensive vision of human
liberation is Chris Sciabarra,[37]
who has advanced the argument in a series of books and articles over
the past two decades, most extensively in his “Dialectics and
Liberty” trilogy (1995b,
1995a,
2000). Sciabarra persuasively
advocates a dialectical orientation in libertarian social
thought, which attends not only to the structural dynamics of statism
but also to the extragovernmental context of statism in
cultural, psychological, and philosophical dimensions. But unlike the
19th century individualists, Sciabarra argues that
dialectics pose a substantial challenge to libertarian
anarchism. In Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical, he
sympathetically interprets Rand’s polemical defense of minarchism as
a dialectical effort to transcend a false dualism between statism and
anarchism (1995a, 278-283). In Total Freedom he devotes four
chapters to a charitable but systematic critique of Rothbard’s
anarcho-capitalism, and the underlying conception of liberty as
“universally applicable, regardless of the context within which
it is embedded or applied” (2000, 218). Sciabarra argues that,
at crucial junctures, Rothbard idealizes the market and the State
into dualistic, opposed spheres, related only through “the
external, mutually antagonistic relationship between voluntarism and
coercion” (2000, 355). This dualism leads Rothbard to romanticize
market processes, proposing “the monistic, utopian resolution of
anarcho-capitalism, in which the state’s functions were fully
absorbed by the market” (360). Thus Rothbard limits libertarianism
to a narrow focus on structural and political questions, and exhibits
a “lack of attention to the vast context within which [libertarian
principles] might exist, evolve, and thrive” (355).[38]

Whether or not Rothbard himself is actually
guilty of the “unanchored utopianism” Sciabarra attributes to him
(2000, 202), Sciabarra’s criticism identifies real strands of thought
within the individualist anarchist tradition.[39]
But in light of the discussion of Equality above, it seems that
minarchists are actually far more prone to synoptic delusions and
narrowly political reform than anarchists: the mystique of State
authority depends on a picture of the State as an external constraint
on civil society, whereas egalitarian anarchism highlights
the fact that freedom is a matter of concrete relations within
society. In any case, the best response to Sciabarra’s challenge is
to exhibit a dialectical anarchism, which connects anarchism
with a systematic understanding and critique of the dynamics of
social power, both inside and outside of the State apparatus. To aid
in doing so, I’d like to set out some of the different possible
relationships between libertarianism and “thicker” bundles of
socio-cultural commitments, which would recommend integrating the
two:

Entailment thickness: the commitments might just be
applications of libertarian principle to some special case, following from
non-aggression simply in light of non-contradiction.[40]

Application thickness: it might be that you could reject
commitments without formally contradicting the non-aggression
principle, but not without in fact interfering with its proper
application. Principles beyond libertarianism alone may be necessary
for determining where my rights end and yours begin, or stripping away
conceptual blinders that prevent certain violations of liberty from being
recognized as such.

Strategic thickness: certain ideas, practices, or
projects may be causal preconditions for a flourishing free society,
giving libertarians strategic reasons to endorse them. Although rejecting them
would be logically compatible with libertarianism, it might make it
harder for libertarian ideas to get much purchase, or might lead a free society
towards poverty, statism or civil war.

Grounds thickness: some commitments might be
consistent with the non-aggression principle, but might undermine or
contradict the deeper reasons that justify libertarian
principles. Although you could consistently accept libertarianism
without the bundle, you could not do so reasonably: rejecting the
bundle means rejecting the grounds for libertarianism.

Conjunction thickness: commitments might be worth
adopting for their own sakes, independent of libertarian
considerations. All that is asserted is that you ought to be a libertarian (for
whatever reason), and, as it happens, you also ought to accept some
further commitments (for independent reasons).

The two extreme cases, entailment thickness and conjunction thickness, can
largely be set aside, since the “relationship” between libertarianism and the
further commitment is either so tight (identity) or so loose (mere conjunction)
as to make the point vacuous. But the three intermediate cases of application
thickness, strategic thickness, and grounds thickness make deeper connections
between libertarianism and a rich set of further commitments that naturally
complement libertarianism.

Consider the conceptual and strategic reasons that libertarians have to
oppose authoritarianism, not only as enforced by governments but also
as expressed in culture, business, the family, and civil society. If
libertarianism is rooted in the principle of equality of authority,
then there are good reasons to think that not only political structures of
coercion, but also the whole system of status and unequal authority
deserves libertarian criticism. And it is important to realize that that system
includes not only exercises of coercive power, but also a knot of ideas,
practices, and institutions based on deference to traditionally constituted
authorities. In the political realm, these patterns of deference show up most
clearly in the honorary titles, submissive etiquette, and unquestioning
obedience extended to heads of state, judges, police, and other visible
representatives of government “law and order.” Although these rituals and habits
of obedience exist against the backdrop of statist coercion and intimidation,
they are also often practiced voluntarily. Similar expectations of deference
show up, to greater or lesser degrees, in cultural attitudes towards bosses in
the workplace, and parents in the family. Submission to traditionally
constituted authorities is reinforced not only through violence and threats, but
also through art, humor, sermons, historiography, journalism, childrearing, etc.
Although political coercion is the most distinctive expression of inequality of
authority, you could—in principle—have an authoritarian
social order without the exercise of coercion. Even in an anarchist society,
everyone might voluntarily agree to bow and scrape when speaking before the
(mutually agreed-on) town Chief. So long as the expectation of deference was
backed up only by means of verbal harangues, social ostracism of “unruly”
dissenters, culturally glorifying the authorities, etc., it would violate
no-one’s individual liberty and could not justifiably be resisted with
force.

But while there’s nothing logically inconsistent about envisioning
these sorts of societies, it is certainly weird. If the underlying
reason for committing to libertarian politics is rooted in the equality of
political authority, then even strictly voluntary expressions of inequality are
hard to reasonably reconcile with libertarianism. Yes, the meek could
voluntarily agree to bow and scrape, and the proud could angrily but
nonviolently demand obsequious forms of address and immediate obedience to their
fiat. But why should they? Libertarian equality delegitimizes the
notion of a natural right to rule or dominate other people’s affairs; the vision
of human beings as rational, independent agents of their own destiny renders
deference and unquestioning obedience ridiculous at best, and probably dangerous
to liberty in the long run. While no-one should be forced to treat her
fellows with the respect due to equals, or cultivate independent self-reliance
and contempt for the arrogance of power, libertarians certainly can—and
should—criticize those who do not, and exhort our
fellows not to rely on authoritarian social institutions, for reasons of both
grounds and strategic thickness.

General commitments to anti-authoritarianism, if applied to specific forms of
social power, have far-reaching implications for the relationship between
libertarianism and anti-racism, gay liberation, and other movements for social
transformation. I have written elsewhere on the strategic and conceptual
importance of radical feminist insights to libertarianism, and vice
versa.[41] The causal and conceptual interconnections
between patriarchal authority, the cult of violent masculinity, and the
militaristic State have been discussed by radical feminists such as Andrea
Dworkin and Robin Morgan, as well as radical libertarians such as Herbert
Spencer and, more recently, Carol Moore.[42] Moreover, the
insights of feminists such as Susan Brownmiller into the pervasiveness of rape,
battery, and other forms of male violence against women, present both a crisis
and an opportunity for the application of libertarian principles.

Libertarianism professes to be a comprehensive theory of human freedom; what
supposedly distinguishes the libertarian theory of justice is that we concern
ourselves with violent coercion no matter who is practicing it. But
what feminists have forced into the public eye in the last 30 years is that we
live in a society where one out of every four women faces rape or battery by an
intimate partner,[43] and where women are threatened or attacked
by men who profess to love them, because the men coercing them believe they have
a right to control “their” women. Male violence against women is nominally
illegal but nevertheless systematic, motivated by the desire for control,
culturally excused, and hideously ordinary. For libertarians, this should sound
eerily familiar; confronting the reality of male violence means nothing less
than recognizing the existence of a violent political order working alongside,
and independently of, the violent political order of statism.[44]
Male supremacy has its own ideological rationalizations, its own propaganda, its
own expropriation, and its own violent enforcement; although often in league
with the male-dominated State, male violence is older, more invasive, closer to
home, and harder to escape than most forms of statism. To seriously oppose all
political violence, libertarians need to fight, at least, a two-front war,
against both statism and male supremacy. It is, then, important to note how the
ideological dichotomy between “personal” and “political” problems, so often
criticized by feminists,[45] has tended to blank out systemic male
violence from libertarian analysis. And also how the writings of some
libertarians on the family—especially those identified with the
“paleolibertarian” political-cultural project—have amounted to little more
than outright denial of male violence. Hans-Hermann Hoppe, for example, goes so
far as to indulge in the conservative fantasy that the traditional “internal
layers and ranks of authority” in the family are actually bulwarks of
“resistance vis-a-vis the state” (Hoppe 2001 § IV). Those “ranks of authority”
in the family mean the pater familias; but whether
father-right is, at a given historical moment, in league with or at odds with
State prerogatives, the fact that it is so widely enforced by the threat or
practice of male violence makes enlisting it in the struggle against statism
look much like enlisting Stalin to fight Hitler—no matter who wins, we all
lose.

Considerations of grounds and strategy also
suggest important connections between anarchism and the virtue of
voluntary mutual aid between workers, in the form of
community organizations, charitable projects, and labor unions. Once
again, the underlying reasons for valuing Liberty also give
good reasons for committing to voluntary solidarity with
your fellow people. One could in principle believe that everyone
ought to be free to pursue her own ends while also holding
that nobody’s ends actually matter except her own.[46]
But again, while the position is possible, it is weird; one
of the best reasons for being concerned about the freedom of others
to pursue their own ends is a certain generalized respect for the
importance of other people’s lives and the integrity of their
choices, which is intimately connected with the libertarian
conception of Equality. That says nothing in favor of forcing
you to participate in welfare schemes,[47]
or robbing Peter to pay Paul; but it does say something for working
with your neighbors in voluntary cooperative efforts to
improve your own lives or the lives of others. It’s likely also that
networks of voluntary aid organizations would be strategically
important to individual flourishing in a free society, in which there
would be no expropriative welfare bureaucracy for people living with
poverty or precarity to fall back on. Projects reviving the
bottom-up, solidaritarian spirit of the independent unions and mutual
aid societies that flourished in the late 19th and early
20th centuries, before the rise of the welfare
bureaucracy, may be essential for a flourishing free society, and one
of the primary means by which workers could take control of their own
lives, without depending on either bosses or bureaucrats.[48]

If 20th century libertarians have
mostly failed to emphasize the potential for cooperative mutual aid,
the failure can be traced to two related confusions, born of
undialectical analysis and the failure to integrate Liberty with
Solidarity. The first conflates the principles of mutual aid with
government coercion in the name of “social welfare”—most
dramatically in the visceral hostility most 20th century
libertarians expressed towards labor unionism. Libertarian critics
have often condemned unions as “bands of thugs,”[49]
the government-privileged foot soldiers of a stagnant,
interventionist political economy. Currently existing labor unions do
use coercive means to organize—in the United States, employers are
forced to enter into collective bargaining with unions that gain
National Labor Relations Board recognition, and non-violent means of
opposing unionization drives, such as retaliatory firing, are legally
prohibited. The official, government-privileged union establishment
also has for decades sought more government planning and
economic intervention. But treating the existing union establishment
as representative of the essential features of organized labor
disregards the historical process by which unions were co-opted,
captured, and domesticated by the expanding State bureaucracy during
the 1920s-1950s. The process was achieved with the collaboration of
one conservative faction within the labor movement,
represented most visibly by the “business unionism” of the AFL,
which gained leverage over its many competitors and seats in the
back-rooms of power through the new system of patronage.[50]
It would be hard to discover from the writings of anti-union
libertarians that labor unions existed before the Wagner Act of 1935,
or that around the turn of the century one of the most vibrant wings
of organized labor were the radical, anarchist-led unions, most
famously the I.W.W., which rejected all attempts to influence or
capture State power.[51]
They argued that putting economic power into the government’s hands
deprived workers of control over their own fate, and wasted
unions’ resources on bureaucracy and partisan maneuvering. Although
they worked for incremental improvements in wages and conditions,
they ultimately hoped to win not reforms of the existing capitalist
system, but workers’ ownership of the “means of production”—the
land, factories, and tools they labored with—not through the
political means of expropriation (as the Marxists suggested), but
through the economic means of free association, agitation, direct
action, voluntary strikes, union solidarity, and mutual aid between
workers, which would “build a new society within the shell of the
old.” The emerging new society, far from the central planning
boards of state socialism, would be a world of independent
contractors and worker-owned co-ops, organized from the bottom up by
the workers themselves.

It was only through the political collaboration
of the establishmentarian union bosses and the “Progressive”
business class—in the form of violent persecution of the radicals,
such as the Palmer raids, and government patronage to establishment
unions through the NLRB—that the centralized, statist unionism of
the AFL-CIO rose to dominance within the labor movement.[52]
Union methods are legally regulated and union demands effectively
constrained to modest (and easily revoked) improvements in wages and
conditions—with issues such as workers’ voice in the workplace, let
alone control of the means of production, dropped entirely. The only
real power remaining to effect more substantial changes comes through
their power as organized blocs for lobbying and electioneering. If
unionism is today mostly statist, then it is because unions are
largely what the State has made them, through the usual carrots and
sticks of government interventionism.

General Motors has benefited at least as
much from government patronage as the UAW, yet libertarian criticism
of the magnates of state capitalism is hardly extended to business as
such in the way that criticism of existing unions is routinely
extended to any form of organized labor. The difference in treatment
is no doubt closely connected with the emphasis many 20th
century libertarians placed on defending capitalism against the
attacks of state socialists. While they were right to see that
existing modes of production should not be further distorted
by even greater government regimentation, this insight was often
perverted into the delusion that existing modes of production would
be the natural outcome of an undistorted market. The
confusion has been encouraged by systematic ambiguity in the term
“capitalism,” which has been used to name at least three
different economic systems:

The free market: any economic order that emerges from
voluntary exchanges of property and labor, free of government intervention and
other forms of systemic coercion.

Alienation of labor: a specific form of labor market, in
which the dominant economic activity is production in workplaces strictly
divided by class, where most workers work for a boss, in return for a
wage, surviving by renting out their labor to someone else. The shop, and the
tools and facilities that make it run, are owned by the boss or by absentee
owners to whom the boss reports, not by the workers themselves.

Since government intervention always ends with the barrel of a gun, free
market “capitalism” and corporate state “capitalism” cannot coexist at the same
time and in the same respect. “Capitalism” in the third sense—the
alienation of labor—is a category independent of “capitalism” in
either of the first two senses. There are many ways that a labor market might
turn out; it could be organized into traditional employer-employee
relationships, worker co-ops, community workers’ councils, or a diffuse network
of shopkeeps and independent contractors. Unflinching free marketeers might
advocate any of these, or might be indifferent as to which prevails;
interventionist statists might also favor traditional employer-employee
relationships (as under fascism) or any number of different arrangements (as
under state communism). Once these three senses are disentangled, it is
important to see how 20th century libertarian defenses of
“capitalism” against interventionist critique have fallen into a second
conflation, between economic defenses of (1) the free market, and (2, 3) the way
that big business operates in the unfree market that actually exists today. This
confused approach, aptly dubbed “vulgar libertarianism” by Kevin Carson,[53]
obscures the ways in which actually existing businesses benefit from pervasive
government intervention, and blinds “capitalist” libertarians to the affinity
between anti-statist models of labor organizing and libertarian defenses of free
markets.

Disentangling free market economics from the particular market structure of
alienated labor reveals some good reasons to think that there are serious
economic problems with bureaucratic, centralized corporate commerce
that rose to dominance in the 19th and 20th centuries under the
auspices of “Nationalist” and “Progressive” interventionism.[54]
Central planners face the knowledge problems identified by Mises, Hayek, and
Rothbard whether those planners are government or corporate bureaucrats.[55] If
workers are often deeply unhappy with the regimented, authoritarian structure of
corporate workplaces, then there is also reason to believe that many would
happily dump the bosses off their backs in favor of more autonomous forms of
work, as those become widespread, successful, and economically reliable. Thus
there is reason to think that in a free market less hierarchical, less
centralized, more worker-focused forms of production would multiply and
bureaucratic big business would wither under the pressure of
competition.[56] Since the cooperative, bottom-up model of
labor unionism offers one of the best existing models for practically asserting
workers’ self-interest, and ultimately replacing boss-centric industry with
decentralized, worker-centric production, there are good reasons for
libertarians to integrate wildcat unionism into their understanding of social
power.

Solidaritarian considerations may also shed some light on the standing debate
amongst libertarians over secession and constitutional centralism. Liberty in
the abstract demands a universal right of secession; to keep any one
person or any group of people under a government that they wish to exit requires
you to violate their individual liberty in at least one of the three ways
challenged above. But voluntarily organized protection agencies, arbiters, etc.
could still claim wide or narrow jurisdictions, and could organize their
administrative and juridical functions into rigid hierarchies or take a more
“horizontal,” decentralized approach. Affirming a right of secession
does not answer the constitutional question of which free arrangement
libertarians ought to prefer. But the same solidaritarian considerations that
tell against centralization and hierarchy in making widgets should tell even
more strongly against centralization and hierarchy in political power. The
pretensions of the powerful threaten a free society when it is hard to defend
yourself physically against abuses of the power entrusted to defense
associations, or intellectually against the allure of State mysticism. And there
are good prima facie reasons to suppose that people will be better able
to resist both threats by devolving power from centralized seats of power down
to the local level, with arbitration and enforcement handled face-to-face
through diffuse networks of local associations, rather than mediated through
powerful, bureaucratized hegemons.

Centralists may object that the historical record is more complex, and less
favorable to decentralism, than prima facie considerations would suggest.
While a centralized political power has more resources and a wider scope to
enforce coercive demands, local powers are often more subject to parochial
prejudices, and can often enforce them with force that is less diffuse, closer
to home, and therefore more intense than anything a mighty but remote central
government could muster. American history seems to illustrate this point
dramatically with the case of the Confederacy, in which the opponents of federal
power urged secession in order to strengthen and perpetuate the absolute tyranny
of chattel slavery.[57] But what is needed here is a more
radical decentralism, dissociated from the humbug of “states’ rights.”
Decentralist libertarians are perfectly justified in supporting the
white Southerners’ right to secede, and condemning the bayonet-point Unionism of
the Civil War—provided that they also support black slaves’
rights to secede from the Southern states, and condemn the bayonet-point
paternalism of the Southern slave-lords.
The approach here is to condemn the
federal war against secession, while also supporting the efforts of black
Southerners to free themselves, through escape or open rebellion.[58]
The problem with the Confederacy was not the defiance of federal
authority, but the elevation of state authority over the objections of
poor whites and black slaves: too much, not too little, centralized power.
Nothing other than pure mysticism limits secession to states or provinces:
provincial governments enjoy no more sovereign authority over their citizens
than the federal government does, and the same principles that justify the
withdrawal of states from the federal union also justify counties or cities
withdrawing from state governments, and neighborhoods or individual
citizens withdrawing from local governments, or from any government
anywhere.

Liberty, understood in the context of Equality and Solidarity, calls for
political revolution against all forms of government, no matter how “limited,”
and overweening centralization of power even in non-coercive institutions. But
“revolution” itself takes on a different character when the obscuring haze of
State mysticism has been dispelled. If “revolution” means the process of
dissolving the legal authority of a government, then revolution is quite easy to
achieve. You have no obligation to obey any government longer than you choose to
remain under it; once you have declared your intent to withdraw from the State,
no government on earth has the authority to force you to recognize its authority
over you—let alone to force you to pay taxes or regiment your behavior. If
a government’s orders invade your rights—and all governments’ orders
eventually do—then you have every right to withdraw from, ignore, defy, or
resist it however seems best to you. Earlier, I stated that this essay’s purpose
was political revolution; then I stated that it was merely to convince you to
become an anarchist. But it should now be clear that I was not moving the
goalposts. If you become an anarchist, then you have already completed
the revolution: no government on earth has any legitimate authority to
bind you to any obligation that you did not already have on your own. It’s a
mistake to think of the State as holding you under its authority while you
struggle to escape; at the most, it has power, not authority
over you. As far as your former government is concerned, you have the moral
standing not of a subject, but of the head of a revolutionary state of one.

Of course, that leaves the question of how best to defend your
revolutionary state from counter-revolutionary invasion. Declaring yourself
independent really is enough to release you from any obligation to your former
government—but try telling that to the judge. Still, the first task is
to recognize your situation for what it is. Minarchism, by leaving the myth of
legal authority unchallenged, concedes moral dignity to the statists that they
have not earned. The point is to challenge not only the abuses of
government authority, but the normal uses of that authority—to see the
taxmen, policemen, hangmen, and Congressmen who invade your liberties not as
unruly representatives of a State with authority over you, but a sanctimonious
gang of robbers, swindlers, and usurpers bringing war upon you. Once
you have recognized that, you can begin to think intelligently about the best
cultural and material arrangements for defending against them. I have already
discussed a few of the particulars above; the rest is another discussion for
another essay.[59]

Charles Johnson (2008)

If you enjoyed this essay, why not pick up a nicely-printed physical copy of it for yourself? Or to pass around town?

Long, Roderick T. (2007). “Market Anarchism As Constitutionalism,”
In Anarchism/Minarchism: Is Government Part of a Free Country?,
ed. Roderick T. Long and Tibor R. Machan. Aldershot: Ashgate. 133–154.

[1] For
the purposes of this essay, I will mostly be using the term
“anarchism” as shorthand for “individualist anarchism;”
since the defense of anarchism I will offer rests on individualist
principles, it will not provide a cogent basis for communist,
primitivist, or other non-individualist forms of anarchism. And I
will use the term “individualist anarchism” in a broad sense, to
describe any position that (1) denies the legitimacy of any form of
(monopoly) government authority, (2) on individualist ethical
grounds. As I will use it, the term picks out a family of similar
doctrines, not a particular self-description or historical
tradition. Thus it includes, but is not limited to, the specific
19th and early 20th century socialist movement
known as “individualist anarchism,” whose members included
Benjamin Tucker, Victor Yarros, and Voltairine de Cleyre. It also
includes the views of 20th and 21st
century“anarcho-capitalists” such as Murray Rothbard and David
Friedman; contemporary self-described “individualist anarchists”
and “mutualists” such as Wendy McElroy, Joe Peacott, and Kevin
Carson; and of others, such as Gustave de Molinari, Lysander
Spooner, or Robert LeFevre, who rejected the State on individualist
grounds but declined (for whatever reasons) to refer to themselves
as “anarchists.” Many self-described “socialist” anarchists
deny that “anarcho-capitalism” should be counted as a form of
anarchism at all, or associated with individualist anarchism in
particular; many self-described “anarcho-capitalists” deny that
“socialist” anarchism should be counted as a form of genuine
individualism, or genuine anarchism. With all due respect to my
comrades on the Left and on the Right, I will use the term in an
ecumenical sense, for reasons of style, and also because the
relationship between anarchism, “capitalism,” and “socialism”
is one of the substantive issues to be discussed in the course of
this essay.

[3] “Libertarianism”
as discussed in this essay is a theory of political justice, not a
position on the Nolan Chart. “Small government” types who speak
kindly of economic freedom or civil liberties may or may not qualify
as “libertarians” for the purpose of my discussion. Those who
treat liberty as one political good that must be balanced against
other goods such as social stability, economic prosperity,
democratic rule, or socioeconomic equality, and should sometimes be
sacrificed for their sake, are unlikely to count. Since they are not
committed to the ideal of liberty as a principled constraint on all
political power, they are no more likely to be directly convinced by
my arguments than progressives, traditionalists, communists, etc.

[4] Of
course, the male Left of the day actually demanded fraternité,
“brotherhood.” I’ll speak of “solidarity” instead of
“brotherhood” for the obvious anti-sexist reasons, and also for
its association with the history of the labor movement. There are
few causes in America that most 20th century libertarians
were less sympathetic to than organized labor, but I have chosen to
speak of “the value of solidarity,” in spite of all that, for
the same reasons that Ayn Rand chose to speak of “the virtue of
selfishness:” in order to prove a point. The common criticisms of
organized labor from the 20th century libertarian
movement, and the relationship between liberty and organized labor,
are one of the topics I will discuss below.

[5] Thus
the libertarian emphasis on both personal freedom and private
property rights. One way to treat someone as if she were your slave
is to force her to serve your ends rather than her own: by forcing
her to apply her own labor and property to some end that she would
not have freely agreed to support, or by forcing her to withhold her
own labor and property from some end that she would have freely
agreed to support. Another way to treat someone as if she were your
slave is to force her to labor for your profit. Even if you do not
force her to work on one job rather than another, you are still
effectively enslaving her by taking the fruits of her labor for your
own purposes.

[6] Thus
Jefferson 1776a: “… That to secure these rights, Governments are
instituted among Men [sic], deriving their just powers from
the consent of the governed” (¶ 2).

[7] It
should be clear that this is a necessary but not a sufficient
condition for counting as the government of a given State. Anybody
might claim the right to issue enforceable legal orders, but only
some of the claimants are part of the government. (I gather that
there are still Bourbon pretenders who claim the right to
rule France; but whatever their aspirations, they are not currently
the government of France.) But for any institution to count as the
government, it must at least make the claim, or act in a way that
manifests the claim: an institution that did not even claim the
right to make enforceable legal orders might very well issue
political position papers; it might give advice on how to live; but
it would not be making laws.

[8] This
is a deliberate revision to the Weberian conception of the State as
a monopoly on the use of legally accepted force. While most modern
governments claim such sweeping authority over enforcement, it is
sheer anachronism to try to build a claim of territorial monopoly
into the definition of the State. Historically many
constitutions have taken it for granted that certain forms of force
(e.g. by parents against children, by husbands against wives, by
masters against slaves) are simply outside of the purview of the
law. It’s true that under most States throughout history, parents
have been able to beat their children without legal repercussions.
But it would be a serious mistake to infer from this that the
government (as sole arbiter of legal enforcement in the territory
within which the family lives) has authorized or deputized
parents to beat their children. Rather, the enforceable authority of
parents over children was thought simply to be a “private”
matter, beyond the “public” realm of questions that the State
claims to address. The enforceability of parental authority is quite
arguably treated as a political given that the State recognizes,
more akin to one State’s recognition of the sovereignty of
other States than to the State’s authorization of the use
of force by deputies, posses, or militias. Some implications of this
idea are teased out below in the discussion of “application
thickness.”

[9] By
using “legitimate” as a modifier on “authority,” I’ve
illustrated an important point, but also run a serious risk. If I
speak of “legitimate authority,” that might seem to suggest that
I’m not distinguishing authority from mere power,
but rather distinguishing two different kinds of authority—the
legitimate kind and the illegitimate kind. Then it would seem that
the issue between minarchists and anarchists is not whether
governments have the authority they claim, but rather whether the
authority they have is legitimate authority or illegitimate
authority. But this is a serious mistake, which I think leads to
other mistakes. For now, it will be enough to note that, as I am
using the terms “legitimacy” and “authority,” all genuine
authority is legitimate authority. “Illegitimate
authority” is not a special kind of authority which is
illegitimate, any more than “counterfeit money” is a special
kind of money which is counterfeit. Illegitimate authority is,
rather, mere power, fraudulently portrayed as rightful authority.

[10] Suppose,
for example, that Norton is an avid birder, and Twain cannot tell a
jackdaw from a magpie. Then when Norton points out a bird and says,
“That is a jackdaw,” Twain ought to consider it a jackdaw,
because Norton said so—even if Twain has no other reason
for considering it a jackdaw besides Norton’s say-so. Why? Because
Norton said so, and Norton knows something about jackdaws whereas
Twain knows nothing about them, so Twain ought to defer to Norton’s
judgment.

[11] Similarly,
it is not enough for a minarchist to show that if you organize
government officials into such-and-such a constitutional order, the
institution you’ve organized will systematically tend towards making
correct rulings on matters of legal right. While the source of the
ruling may justify a (defeasible) presumption that it can
legitimately be enforced, the way that it justifies has
nothing to do with government authority.

[12] Taken
severally, each challenge poses a problem for one of forms
of special authority that minarchists have traditionally wanted
governments to exercise. I think the import of each individual
challenge is actually less than anarchists have
historically thought: minarchists could respond to any individual
challenge by revising their theory, and promoting an even more
minimalist government that abdicates the function that each
challenge called into question. But taken together, the
three challenges jointly whittle a “properly limited government”
down to no government at all: any institution that minarchists could
make consistent with liberty, in light of all three
challenges, would have abandoned all claims of sovereign authority,
and thus abdicated the throne.

[17] It could go
on calling itself a “government,” of course—just as Emperor Norton went on
calling himself Emperor of North America even though he had no subjects except
those who voluntarily played along with his game. But it would no longer be a
“government” in any sense that’s incompatible with individualist anarchism.
(Specifically, whatever it fancied itself, it would no longer be claiming the
sovereign authority of the State; see the section on Equality below.)

[18] Classical
liberals and minarchist libertarians have sometimes tried to
sidestep anarchist objections by appealing to the consent of the
governed. Even if government sovereignty entails limitations on
private citizens’ freedom to defend themselves directly, not all
limitations on liberty violate libertarian principles: free people
can bind themselves to new obligations by agreeing to contracts.
Liberal theorists draw up the analogy of a “social contract,”
and claim that private citizens can be bound to recognize the
government’s sovereignty by explicit, or tacit, or hypothetical
consent to the terms of the political system. This sort of reply
could be made to any of the three challenges that I pose, and so
deserves a response. Unfortunately, constraints of space prevent me
from giving an adequate response. Fortunately, excellent systematic
critiques of the claim already exist in Spooner 1867-1870 and the
first chapter of Barnett 2004. In any case minarchists should be
very hesitant to draw on appeals to tacit consent: exactly the same
argument could just as easily be used to justify all forms of
taxation (on the theory that citizens consented to pay for
government expenses when they consented to the contract), many forms
of invasive laws (on the theory that citizens consented to abide by
the government’s standards of conduct or hygiene), etc. Most serious
defenders of minarchism in the 20th century have seen
this difficulty and have tried to develop theories which provide for
the legitimacy of government without the need for unanimous consent,
whether tacit or explicit.

[20]Nozick,
unlike some who advance the procedural argument, takes this point in
stride: his argument is not that the government enjoys a specialright over and above what private citizens enjoy, but rather that a
locally dominant defense association, in the course of carrying out its daily
business, will be put in the special position of either permitting or
forbidding any efforts at private enforcement within its sphere of influence,
due to its special position as the local hegemon. Nozick argues that this gives
the agency a de facto monopoly on the authorization
of force, without the exercise of special prerogatives and without treading on
the liberty of the defense associations and private citizens constrained by the
procedural protections. If this argument worked, then Nozick would have
established a legitimate path for a locally dominant defense agency to assert
sovereignty, without treading on the liberty of others. He also would have made
the argument in precisely the way that I suggested a minarchist would need to:
his argument would have demonstrated the connection between sovereignty and the
special position of the government within society—specifically the special
position conferred by being the sole dominant protective agency in a given
locality. But as I shall argue presently, Nozick’s transition from procedural
protection to ex ante procedural “oversight” will not bear scrutiny.

[21] A
defense association (A) may very well be entitled to suppress a
would-be enforcer (B) who refuses to disclose the
procedures that she used to determine guilt. If A cannot discover
whether a procedure is reliable or completely arbitrary, then they
may be entitled to treat the claim as arbitrary pending further
investigation. But it is up to A to do the leg-work of finding out
what B’s procedures are before they declare that they cannot
discover them. A can try to find out about B’s procedures by
directly asking B, or by sending someone to sit in on B’s
proceedings, or by asking former participants in B’s proceedings, or
by finding out whether B has informed anyone else of her procedures,
or in any number of other ways. A cannot simply sit back
and demand that B submit to “oversight” as defined by A, or
suppress B simply for failing to fill out the right forms. If A
fails to make serious efforts at discovery, then it is they,
not B, who are guilty of arbitrary and unreliable
enforcement procedures.

[22] Suppose
I announce, “I will stop anyone who tries to stab me with a knife.
But I will not stop anyone who is only using a knife to slice a loaf
of bread.” Have I claimed the right to oversee the use of
knives? Have I permitted you to slice bread with a knife?

[23] Although
this reply would indeed preserve a form of sovereignty against the
Childs challenge, it is worth noting how radical a reduction in the
size and scope of the “minimal State” is required to meet the
challenge. A government that maintained only a monopoly on
legislating and adjudicating rights, but left
enforcing them up to private efforts, would be a very
limited government indeed; it might very well have no police, no
executive bureaucracy, no intelligence agencies, no border guards,
and no armies. The microscopic State that resulted would be far more
limited than Rand’s “limited government,” even more minimal than
Nozick’s “ultraminimal state.” Sovereignty would be asserted by
a properly limited government only insofar as general laws and
rulings on specific legal disputes would be made under the authority
of a single government. The microscopic State would have no
authority to override or exclude private citizens from just efforts
to protect their own rights, or the rights of others; its
sovereignty would rest in its authority to act as a “final
standard” on the definition and application of rights. In fact the
closest historical analogue would be the constitution of medieval
Iceland—a society most often discussed in libertarian
literature for illustrations of what a functioning anarchy
might look like. The Icelandic Free State was not an
anarchy: there was a sovereign legislature (the
Althing),
which also served as a court of final appeal; but it remains
interesting to anarchists because the legal order in Iceland
functioned with no central executive. (For a detailed discussion of
the constitution of medieval Iceland, see Byock 2001.
Long 2002a
sets out the both the continuities and departures from anarchist
principles in the constitution of the Free State, and explains the
eventual collapse of the Free State as the growth of the microscopic
germs of government into bases of power for warlordism and civil
war.)

[24] See also
Spooner’s “Letter to Thomas F. Bayard”
(1882a) and “Natural Law; or, the Science
of Justice” (1882b) for close variations on the same challenge. Childs
himself also anticipates something like this line of argument, and makes
arguments that Rand’s epistemological and ethical positions demand a similar
conclusion. I’ve picked out Spooner’s version of the challenge in the letter to
Cleveland because it provides the most systematic exposition of the point.

[25] If
the government passed a resolution stating that the square of the
hypotenuse in a right triangle is always equal to the square of the
other two sides, then the resolution would say something true,
and something that everyone is obliged to believe. But it would
hardly justify the claim that we need a properly geometrical
government to serve as the “final arbiter” of the properties of
right triangles.

[26]Spooner 1882b argues that the principles of
justice are “usually a very plain and simple matter, easily understood by common
minds” (Section IV ¶ 1), and that “Men [sic] living
in contact with each other, and having intercourse together, cannot
avoid learning natural law, to a very great extent” (Section IV ¶ 2). If
so, then the “commands” of natural justice could all be understood as
conclusions of arguments, without the need to appeal to the authority of
experts. While I think that this is true of most if not all cases, nothing turns
on it for the purposes of the challenge to legislative authority. If there are
cases where understanding or applying the principles of justice requires
expertise, then all those hard cases should be turned over to some expert for
judgment. But it would be fallacious to infer from that that there must be some
expert to whom all hard cases are turned over. In any case, the basis for the
authority of the judgment would be acknowledged wisdom and judgment, not
personal political position.

[28] That does
not mean that Twain can later renege and ignore Norton’s decision, if
he consented to let Norton decide the case. It does mean that Twain can
later decline to let Norton decide any more cases for him. See note 10 on the
failure of historical liberal theories to meet the criteria for genuine consent,
including those that rely on claims of “tacit consent.”

[29] Perhaps
under dire enough circumstances – if, for example, the dispute is not only
unresolved but careening towards a violent feud – the parties to the dispute
could rightfully be forced to the bargaining table by an impartial third party.
I am not confident that this is true, but I am not confident that it is false,
either. What I am confident of is that, if third parties ever have the
right to force arbitration, then the right is possessed by everyone,
and has nothing to do with the special prerogatives of a government to
arbitrate. For the government to claim an exclusive or
superior authority to intervene within an arbitrarily asserted
jurisdiction might not usurp the natural liberty of the disputants. But if it
did not, then it would usurp the natural liberty of other potential
arbiters, who would have just as much of a right to intervene as the self-styled
“government.”

[30] I
do, actually, think that the relationship between libertarianism and
these forms of egalitarianism is more complex than many 20th
century libertarians have suggested; but that’s an issue for later
discussion.

[31] Jefferson
makes this point even more explicitly, if less elegantly, in his
original draft of the Declaration, where the same passage reads: “We
hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable: that all men are
created equal and independent; that from that equal creation
they derive rights inherent and inalienable, among which are the
preservation of life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”
(1776b ¶ 2, emphasis added).

[32] The
original conception of Equality from the revolutionary Left
appreciates human plurality and supports an uncompromising
individualism in politics—not the anonymizing mass
politics of the statist Left, in both its “progressive” and
“radical” incarnations. Nozick expresses the point admirably:
“Side constraints express the inviolability of other persons. But
why may not one violate persons for the greater social good? ….
But there is no social entity with a good that undergoes
some sacrifice for its own good. There are only individual people,
different individual people, with their own individual lives. Using
one of these people for the benefit of others, uses him [sic]
and benefits the others. Nothing more. What happens is that
something is done to him for the sake of others. Talk of an overall
social good covers this up. (Intentionally?) To use a person in this
way does not sufficiently respect and take account of the fact that
he is a separate person, that his is the only life he has. He
does not get some overbalancing good from his sacrifice, and no one
is entitled to force this upon him—least of all a state or
government” (1974, 32-33).

[33] The
point here is not that deliberation about consequences is completely
irrelevant to questions of justice. Like Roderick Long (2002b), I
hold that, while deliberation about consequences cannot trump
deliberation about rights, our understanding of the content
of rights can be revised in light of consequences. (Thus, for
example, consequentialist considerations can be important to
determining the proper judgment in a case of reducing the natural
law.) But if our judgments about the requirements of justice can be
revised in light of reflection on the consequences, the revision can
(indeed must) go the other way, too. What counts as a “good
consequence” also partly depends on what justice demands; in
particular, if bringing about a situation S involves you in
initiating force against an innocent person, then S is not
a good consequence: being unjust is a defeater for an end counting
as something worth pursuing. It is in this sense that rights act as
“side constraints” (Nozick 1974, 28-33) on
moral deliberation.

[34] Government
edicts have no more magical power to enforce themselves than decisions by
anarchistic arbitrators. If someone is unhappy with the way a case was decided
on final appeal, she can lobby Congress to change the law, or try to convince
the President to appoint more congenial justices, or simply defy the ruling and
try to find followers to stage a coup or a revolution…. See also Long 2006, which connects the mystical political
conception behind the minarchist quest for legal finality with the mystical
logical conception behind the metaphysical quest for a self-applying
rule, as exposed by Wittgenstein’s
writing on rule-following.

[35] See Tucker 1888 for an overview of the “four
monopolies” that he believed to be at the root of both statism and the
exploitation of labor: the land monopoly, the money monopoly, the tariff
monopoly, and the patent monopoly. Chapter Five of Carson 2004 offers an excellent systematic
overview of the views of Tucker and his fellow 19th century
individualists on the four monopolies.

[37] This
holistic picture of social power has been endangered and marginalized, but never
completely eradicated, from libertarian theory in the 20th century.
During the late 1960s and 1970s it was partially and fitfully revived by the
efforts of libertarians such as Murray Rothbard, Karl Hess, and Sam Konkin to
make common cause with anti-imperialist and anti-authoritarian elements in the
New Left. For the locus classicus of this approach in
the late 20th century libertarian movement, see Rothbard 1965.

[38]Sciabarra
is at pains to make clear that his critique does not aim at a
refutation of anarchism as such; his emphasis is
methodological, and for his critique “The essential issue is not
whether anarchism or minarchism is preferable—to some extent, the jury is
still out on many of the important questions raised by either side” (341). But
he suggests that dialectics call for substantial revision to existing defenses
of anarchism, stating in reply to a review that “I remain profoundly suspicious
of anarchism and the non-dialectical premises that seem to inspire it” (2002, 394).

[39] See Long 2001b for a detailed defense of Rothbard
against Sciabarra’s criticism. But if the anti-dialectical Rothbard did not
exist, Walter Block has invented him.

[40]
An Aztec libertarian might urge, “Of course
libertarianism has upshots for religious beliefs! It means you have
to give up human sacrifice to Huitzilopochtli.”

[43] See
Tjaden and Thoennes 2000 on the findings of the NIJ/CDC National
Violence Against Women Survey in 1995-1996. Statistics on violence
against women have been hotly contested, and some of these disputes
have been taken up by libertarian authors such as Wendy McElroy. But
most of the discussion has focused on the findings of a single
study, Mary Koss’s 1985 study of sexual assault amongst college
women (which found that one in four college-aged women had suffered
at least one act of rape or attempted rape in her lifetime). I think
the criticisms of Koss are largely unfounded, but in any case Tjaden
and Thoennes surveyed a broader sample, using more detailed
questions, and definitions substantially more conservative than
Koss; see pp. 3-12 for a discussion of the survey methodology.
Detailed explanation and defense of the NVAWS figures, and of
related feminist research into the prevalence and nature of gender
violence is, as they say, beyond the scope of this essay, but for an
excellent discussion of Koss’s findings that raises many salient
general points, see Warshaw 1994, which includes both an analysis of
the findings and a concluding methodological discussion by Koss.

[44] Thus
Susan Brownmiller writes that “Man’s discovery that his genitalia
could serve as a weapon to generate fear must rank as one of the
most important discoveries of prehistoric times, along with the use
of fire and the first crude stone axe. From prehistoric times to the
present, I believe, rape has played a critical function. It is
nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by
which all men keep all women in a state of fear”
(1975, 15). Libertarian critics often dismiss Brownmiller’s and
similar analyses on the grounds that not all men are rapists and not
all women are raped, but this badly misunderstands Brownmiller’s
point. Brownmiller is concerned with the systemic role of
rape, considered as a social fact that affects all men and all
women, whether or not the particular man commits rape or the
particular woman suffers it. The fact that rape is so prevalent—even
more prevalent than Brownmiller realized in 1975—and the
constraints that the threat of rape imposes on all women in
ordinary life systematically structures the social relationships
between men and women, as Brownmiller details throughout her book.
Similar remarks could be made about other pervasive forms of
violence against women, such as wife beating. The systemic violence
of male dominance ought to be recognizable to libertarians as a
politically coercive order, even though it is usually carried out in
“society,” independently of the State apparatus; as Catharine
MacKinnon writes, “Unlike the ways in which men systematically
enslave, violate, dehumanize, and exterminate other men, expressing
political inequalities among men, men’s forms of dominance over
women have been accomplished socially as well as economically, prior
to the operation of the law, without express state acts, often in
intimate contexts, as everyday life” (1989, 161).

[45] See
Hanisch 1969/1978 for the original formulation of the idea that “the
personal is political:” “So the reason I participate in these
meetings is not to solve any personal problem. One of the first
things we discover in these groups is that personal problems are
political problems. There are no personal solutions at this time.
There is only collective action for a collective solution.” It
must be stressed that for Hanisch and other radical feminists,
“collective action” and “political action” do not
necessarily entail State action. The point is to recognize
the conditions faced by individual women as expressions of an
overarching system of social power, rather than sweeping it under
the rug of the “private.” Cf. Johnson and Long 2005, §2.

[47] Quite the
contrary; respect for your fellow human beings entails that you must respect
each person’s perfect right to refuse or to withdraw her support, and
vice versa—and that anyone who tries to
force the unwilling to participate in their collective project is
nothing more than a sanctimonious highwayman.

[48] During
the late 19th and early 20th century, before
the rise of the modern welfare State, there was in fact a vast and
growing network of mutual aid societies in which low-income workers
pooled their resources to gain affordable healthcare, small-scale
credit, lifelong education, information about wages and conditions
in workplaces, worker-run hiring halls, labor bargaining, strike
relief, personal and cultural connections, old-age pensions, life
insurance, and many other important services which were later
co-opted and colonized by the emerging welfare bureaucracy.
Sometimes the independent, government-free societies withered due to
obsolescence; in other cases—particularly radical labor unions
such as the Industrial Workers of the World—they were destroyed by
violent government persecution. See Beito 2000 for an excellent
discussion in the context of the rise and fall of voluntary
“fraternal society” or “friendly society” lodges.
Reconnecting with this history would have direct strategic benefits
for libertarians, insofar as similar voluntary associations are
likely to be an important part of any healthy free market. Besides
those direct benefits, it may also be worth considering the
likelihood that mutual aid projects based on free association and
self-help could help divorce well-meaning Leftists from the mystique
of the welfare State. (Even if it does not cure their souls, it may
at least give them something less destructive to do with their time
and resources.)

[49] Most
recently by Walter Block (2006), in his working paper criticizing
“thick libertarianism,” whether allied with Left-wing or
Right-wing cultural politics.

[50] See
Buhle 1999, especially Chapter 1 and pp. 119-136, on the
consolidation of establishmentarian unionism and the “tripartite”
system of managerial planning between the government, the captains
of industry, and the labor bosses of the official unions.

[52] Under
the smothering patronage of the Wagner/Taft-Hartley labor
bureaucracy, official unions gained new political privileges that
made them the most effective vehicles for workers’ short-term goals,
allowing them to out-compete the unsubsidized unions. But the price
of government privileges were government controls: the NLRB system
constrained union goals to mediated settlements with management, and
in 1947 the Taft-Hartley Act pulled official union tactics firmly
into the regulatory grip of the managerial State. Union methods are
legally restricted to collective bargaining and limited strikes.
Strikes cannot legally be expanded to secondary or general strikes,
and any strike can be—as many strikes have been—broken by the
arbitrary fiat of the President of the United States. Obvious
violations of the freedom of contract—such as the ban on union
hiring halls and “closed shop” contracts—strip
officially-recognized unions of effective tactics and sap their
resources. The emphasis on collective bargaining and bureaucratic
mediation favors centralized union bureaucracies over more
decentralized, democratic forms of organization. Thus both the
internal culture of the post-Wagner union establishment and the
external controls of federal and state regulations have conspired to
enrich a select class of professional unionists while hamstringing
the labor movement as a whole and limiting progress for
rank-and-file workers.

[53] “Vulgar
libertarian apologists for capitalism use the term ‘free market’ in an equivocal
sense; they seem to have trouble remembering, from one moment to the next,
whether they’re defending actually existing capitalism or free market
principles. So we get the standard boilerplate article in The Freeman [on sweatshop
labor] arguing that the rich can’t get rich at the expense of the poor, because
‘that’s not how the free market works’—implicitly assuming that this
is a free market. When prodded, they’ll grudgingly admit that the
present system is not a free market, and that it includes a lot of state
intervention on behalf of the rich. But as soon as they think they can get away
with it, they go right back to defending the wealth of existing corporations on
the basis of ‘free market principles’” (Carson 2004,
142).

[54] For
an extensive discussion of the nature of the corporate State and the
role of government patronage in the formation of actually existing
capitalism, see especially part two of Carson 2004
and Kolko 1963.

[55] It
is important to remember that the calculation problem, as variously
formulated, has to do either with the lack of market pricing or with
the dispersal of idiosyncratic knowledge, not essentially with the
use of coercive means. Political coercion is one of the most
effective ways to stifle negotiation and shove people with
idiosyncratic knowledge out of the way. But it is not the only way;
voluntary structures can block the flow of knowledge no less than
coercive ones. Cf. Rothbard 1962,
Chapter 10, Section F on the
calculation problems that would be faced by One Big Cartel, even
without government intervention.

[56] See
Long 2005 for an economic analysis of the trade-offs involved in
increasing the size of firms and the economic factors that would
tend towards greater decentralization in a free market.

[57] Whether
or not Southern secessionism was closely linked with slavery is –
God help us all – still a matter of considerable controversy in
libertarian intellectual circles. But see Hummel 1996 for a
persuasive argument that while the Federal government’s
motives in pursuing the Civil War had little to do with freeing
slaves, the Confederate states’ motives for seceding were
dominated by the desire to perpetuate and expand race slavery.

[58] The
most dramatic historical example of this line of argument can be found in the
work of Lysander Spooner, who penned No
Treason (1867-1870) as a defense of the moral right of the Southern
states to secede from the Union, but also published a “Plan for the Abolition of Slavery” (1858)
which called on slaves and non-slaveholding whites to launch a guerrilla war
against Southern slaveholders, with aid and comfort provided by Northern
abolitionists. Thus in No Treason, Spooner stated that “The result
– and a natural one – has been that we have had governments, State and national,
devoted to nearly every grade and species of crime that governments have ever
practised upon their victims; and these crimes have culminated in a war that has
cost a million of lives; a war carried on, upon one side, for chattel slavery,
and on the other for political slavery; upon neither for liberty, justice, or
truth” (No. II, § X ¶
2). Hummel 1996 offers an excellent
historical defense of a similar view of the secession crisis and the Civil
War.

[59] A project like this one cannot be undertaken without accumulating debts. My own are too
numerous to give an accounting of them all; but in particular I would like to
thank Laura Breitenbeck and Roderick Long for patience, inspiration,
collaboration, encouragement, and detailed and very helpful comments.

Coalitions of the Willing

This site is designed to be accessible for any web device, including text-only browsers and browsers with aids for users with visual or motor disabilities. For details, see the accessibility statement for radgeek.com.